


Accidentally in Love

by noblydonedonnanoble



Category: Big School (TV), Broadchurch, Fright Night (2011), The Office (US)
Genre: F/M, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-06
Updated: 2014-07-06
Packaged: 2018-02-07 16:36:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1906047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noblydonedonnanoble/pseuds/noblydonedonnanoble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter Vincent never believed in soul mates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Accidentally in Love

                Peter Vincent never believed in soul mates. 

                Growing up, the adults all around him constantly shoved stories down his throat about meeting their soul mates. They say that when you first see them, it feels like the world stops turning. That your life is never the same. 

                It just made him sick. 

                Her name showed up on his arm when he was twelve and he got into the habit of wearing long sleeves because he couldn't stand to look at it. When he was sixteen, he bought himself a fake I.D. and went into a tattoo parlor to get it covered up.

                Not that he could forget how the words looked on his skin, but it made it easier to ignore.

                Two days before his eighteenth birthday, he met someone with her name, and for just a second he allowed himself to be curious; but the last name was wrong and he didn't like her much, anyway, after getting to know her.

                By the time he was twenty, he’d stopped wondering whether every girl he met would introduce herself and _those words_ would slip from her mouth, because they never did. He slept with women who had other blokes’, sometimes other women’s, names on their arms and he didn’t think twice anymore.  

                When he was twenty-two, he and his older brother, Alec, were out at a pub when Peter met a woman—Sarah Postern. For a moment, he was rendered speechless.

                He found his brother and pointed out this girl, said he thought she looked like his type. Six months later he was best man at their bloody wedding, and he’d long since tired of repeating the line, “No, I’d completely forgotten the name on Alec’s arm. It was just a lucky guess.”

                Another pair of soul mates, happily settled, and it was all because of him. How nauseating.

                Then came his twenty-third birthday.

                Peter had just been fired from his job, so his mates took him out to get sloshed. As a fuck you to bosses, to birthdays, to the world in general.

                Somehow he found himself alone at the bar about halfway through the night. Everyone he’d come with was in the loo, on the dance floor, or had wimped out and gone home early because they had 9-to-5 jobs that paid good money and they didn’t want to miss out on that. Peter had expected this; all his birthday parties dating back to childhood had gone essentially this way.

                Mind you, he was still bitter. Just unsurprised.

                A girl claimed the stool beside him. He made a not-so-private show of scanning her up and down as the bartender took her order. He liked her hair, all firey and bright. Her other assets weren’t so bad, either.

                She looked over at him too. Her eyes flickered immediately to his bare forearm—a habit that everyone had, Peter included. Her arm was covered. Not that it mattered much; he knew what words he _wouldn’t_ see there.

                “Is your soul mate a wolf?”

                For just a second, he thought she was serious. Even after he realized that she wasn’t, he decided to go along with it. “Actually, yes, she is. And I’ll have you know we’re very happy together.”

                Her eyes lit up as she laughed and Peter thought it was cute.

                “But seriously, why’d you get it there? Has she already died or something?”

                He was both stunned and slightly turned on by her utter lack of tact. “No. I just don’t believe in soul mates.”

                “Oh, I see, you’re one of those.” The girl smirked.

                “One of what?” Peter Vincent wasn’t anything, he was just Peter fucking Vincent. He was certainly not ‘one of those’, whatever _those_ are.

                “Who was it?”

                “Who was _what_?”

                “Who was it that split up?”

                Yeah, he was not drunk enough for this.

                He stared at her blankly. No one split up. Just bloody tell her that _no one split up_.

                “My dad left my mum.”

                Scratch that, Peter was definitely _too_ drunk, if he was going around blurting things like that. His own brothers didn’t know that was why he’d shunned the idea of a soul mate and he’d let it slip to this stranger within two minutes.

                “Oh Christ, I’m sorry.” She looked it, too. Not that it mattered much to Peter.

                “It’s got nothing to do with my beliefs, though,” he rushed to tell her. “I just think it’s bull shit that the name of the person we’re destined to spend our lives with can appear on our arms when we’ve only just started secondary school.”

                “Okay.” It didn’t look like the girl believed him.

                He really wanted to explain this away. He couldn’t even justify to himself why he cared so much, but he kept pushing. “No, but aren’t you tired of looking at every stranger walking down the street and wondering if they’re called…”

                “Peter Vincent.”

                “No, I’m talking about your soul mate.”

                She gave him an odd look. “That is my soul mate.”

                He froze. Tried very hard to suppress the urge to vomit. Heard his heartbeat pounding in his ears as he stared at this girl and spent much longer than was probably necessary to muddle through this information and gather that if she was saying what he thought she was saying…

                “Nellie?” The word came out as a hoarse whisper.

                And this girl was a lot quicker on the uptake—though in Peter’s defense, he’d had an awful lot of alcohol through him already.

                “You’re Peter Vincent.”

                “You’re Nellie Bertram.” The name he saw when he closed his eyes to go to sleep, the name that ran through his mind whenever his eyes went glassy and he stared off into space, and he was saying it aloud for the first time in a decade.

                They stared at each other. Peter was too terrified to break the silence but Nellie seemed to be waiting for some sort of cue from him.

                “It’s my birthday today,” he told her at last.

                “I wish I had known, I’d have gotten you a present.”

                Peter leaned in closer and whispered conspiratorially, “I’m sure we’ll think of a way for you to make it up to me.”


End file.
